Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

Schedule it today, VMworld Europe 2011, sign up for #VSP1682 and #GD43

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I just looked at the VMworld website and it seems that most sessions are filling up quickly, including my sessions. If you want to to attend these sessions make sure you schedule them rather sooner than later! These are my sessions:

  • Tuesday 13:30 – EXPERTS-01  – Knowledge Experts One-on-One
    These are 15 minute one-on-one session where you will get the chance to ask me anything. So if you want to sit down and discuss something make sure to schedule / book it!
  • Wednesday 15:00 – VSP1682  VMware vSphere Clustering Q&A  (Twitter hashtag: #VSP1682)
    Our Q&A session… Frank Denneman and I will be answering anyone question related to HA, DRS, DPM or Storage DRS. Chris Colotti will be moderating it! We will be giving away a bunch of signed copies of our book again to those who manage to ask a question which stumps us. As Chris likes to call it stump the chumps.
  • Thursday 11:00 – GD43  vSphere Clustering with Duncan Epping (Twitter hashtag: #GD43)
    This is a true group discussion. Room for roughly 50 people and I will ask several questions around HA / DRS / SDRS and we will discuss scenarios / environments / challenges. Make sure to sign up quickly as there are only 50 spots available!

Frank and I are also planning a book signing session, as soon as we have the details we will fill you in!

This article is dedicated to the Foo Fighters!

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** disclaimer: if you don’t care about music / the Foo Fighters stop reading and skip to the next article **

As you know by now, besides virtualization I also love music. I’ve always been active doing articles / interviews and much more in the past but at a point I decided to focus my writing on virtualization. Every now and then I get the urge to write something not virtualization related and this time Foo Fighters is what triggered this sporadic change of topic.

I’ve been a Nirvana fan since one of the first albums. I loved every single song and was always intrigued by their drummer Dave Grohl and one of their guitarists Pat Smear. I already knew Pat Smear as he used to be part of The Germs and I was a hardcore-punk kid. When Nirvana released In Utero, which back then disappointed the more “poppy” fans of Nirvana, I loved it. It was loud and fast, just the way I liked it. Not as loud and fast as most of the music I would normally listen to, but hey it was close enough. Nirvana came to an end and I expected that to be the last to ever be heard of the individual band members…

It didn’t take long before the rumors start spreading around, Nirvana’s drummer Dave Grohl was working on something called the Foo Fighters. When their first album dropped I bought it without hesitating. It was different than I expected and to be honest I was slightly disappointed. I expected a bit less pop and more grunge / punk considering Dave wrote these songs… After listening to the album for 10 maybe 20 times I got used to the sound and the songs started to stick and grow on me. I kept following the band but they never struck me the way Nirvana could. When they released “Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace” that all of a sudden changed. Although it still wasn’t as edgy as I hoped it would be. But things were changing for the better and I was anxiously awaiting their new album… Wasting Light.

Wasting Light is the album I played the most over the last 5 years and maybe even 10. I think I listen to it at least twice a day and it never gets boring. Every single song on Wasting Light is amazing. I’ve read a lot of reviews for Wasting Light and most of them seem to come to the same conclusion that this a great rock album but not much more and definitely not renewing… even call it artistically diminishing but the fact of the matter is that this is Rock. Yes with a capital R! A rock album doesn’t need to be renewing, no a rock album needs to have an edge to it. All things need to come together at the same time, and when that happens you have a classic album. The last 5-10 years I was never really impressed as most rock albums were over-produced. Rock doesn’t need to be perfect.

It was difficult to pick just one song as I love most songs on this album, but I really like Arlandria. The reason for it being that this song could be the seen as the summary of this album. This song contains everything a perfect Foo Fighters song should contain. Arlandria by the Foo Fighters.

Host Profile noncompliant when using local SAS drives with vSphere 5?

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While playing around with vSphere 5.0 in my home lab I discovered something with regards to Host Profiles. I installed a host and created a Host Profile from that host. When I installed a new host and linked the host profile the following error would be returned (also see screenshot below) that the host was noncompliant:

Specification state absent from host: device '<datastore>' state needs to be set to 'on'
Host state doesn't match specification: device '<datastore>' needs to be reset
Specification state absent from host: device '<datastore>' Path Selection Policy needs to be set to 'VMW_PSP_FIXED'
Host state doesn't match specification: device '<datastore>' Path Selection Policy needs to be set to default for claiming SATP

After digging around I thought the issue where the ESXi installer didn’t recognize the SAS disk as a local disk and as such wouldn’t create a scratch partition and I figured this might be the same thing. I start digging and it seems to be a “similar” problem. The SAS disk is seen as a shared disk and as such the NAA identifier is stored. Now in my case each host will have a local disk and each of those disks will have a unique NAA ID which means that even if you apply your host profile it will not be compliant. After digging a bit further I bumped into a KB article (2002488) that actually describes this exact problem.

There’s a “work around” to get rid of the “compliance” alert as mentioned in the KB article:

The compliance error can be ignored if the issue is only a device ID mismatch. To avoid generating a compliance error, you can also disable the PSA and NMP profiles under Storage Configuration in the host profile as long as you do not change other PSA or NMP profile settings.

I read the article 14 times and still didn’t have a clue what they were referring to but this is how you “disable” the PSA and NMP profile for these devices:

  • Right click the Host Profile and click “Enable/Disable Profile Configuration
  • Unfold “Storage Configuration”
  • Unfold “Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) …
  • De-select “PSA Device Configuration”
  • Unfold “Native Multi-Pathing (NMP)”
  • Unfold “PSP and SATP configuration for NMP devi…”
  • De-select “PSP configuration for”
  • Click “OK”

This resolved the issue I had. I’ve also requested the KB article (2002488) to be updated to include these steps by the way. Hopefully it will be changed soon.

Patching your Image Profile (stateless ESXi)

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The first patch for ESXi has been released so I figured this was a great time to create and article around how to patch your Image Profile with a new update. The process is fairly straight forward as in this case you will need to create a new image-profile (described here) and link it to a new rule (New-DeployRule and make that rule active (Add-DeployRule). That is what I like about Stateless. You can just prepare a new Image Profile, create a new rule and you are good to go. A reboot of your ESXi host will load up the latest Image Profile. I did this within a couple of minutes and I’m now running build 474610 of ESXi.

While I was playing around I decided to do things in an incorrect order to see if I could break it, and of course I did manage to break it… I managed to fix all of it though. The first thing I did was testing the rule set and repairing it as documented below.

Now if you run into any issues you can repair the ruleset by using the following command:

Get-VMHost <esxi host> | Test-DeployRuleSetCompliance | Repair-DeployRuleSetCompliance

Now if your host boots and mentions that there’s no rule associated you might want to try the following:

Get-DeployRule

If your newly created rule is returned you will want to make sure it is active:

Get-DeployRuleSet

If there’s nothing listed it means no rules are currently active (active ruleset is what the documentation will refer to). You you can set the rule as active as follows:

Set-DeployRuleSet -DeployRule <name of rule>

Everyone who is considering using Auto-Deploy I would most definitely recommend to explore these commands and to try to break things and fix it. Document your steps along the way, I am certain it will be valuable at some point!